Hopelessly peripatetic.

Tag: health

If you’re a bio-nerd like me, you’ve known about Ebola for a very long time. You knew it was trouble from the get-go and wondered how it would unfold should it get widespread. Well, now we know. But as things have unfolded, I see three things that I feel expose our techno-optimism for what it is: […]

I’m so excited to be at HealthFOO this weekend (it had been postponed from April). And I am extremely humbled by the folks who will be there. Of course, I’ll be there with an open mind to hoover all I can and collide it all in my wee head to see what interesting things come […]

I’ve been getting a feeling that EMR systems, while here, are a decade late. While I am totally in favor of digitizing the patient, what EMR vendors set out to do – capture patient encounter information in a structured way – is no longer appropriate or scalable, at least in the way they chose that […]

I was blessed with an invitation to HealthFOO this year, here in nearby Cambridge. Alas, the event was cancelled due to the intense events after the Boston Marathon. But not only was I bummed out that I wasn’t going to spend a fun weekend with follow health enthusiasts, but I also had to cancel my […]

I wasn’t so sure how to describe Treato. It’s really interesting – mixing semantic analysis, social media, medical records, and analysis – Treato is really the next level of how consumers research diseases. The image to the right is one that came from searching for Lyme disease. I am not sure how they assemble that […]

When I was at SXSW, I spent most of my time at either Big Data or Healthcare sessions. The interesting thing is that the Big Data sessions always devolved to talking about healthcare and the healthcare sessions always spoke about Big Data. One aspect of the fusion of big data and healthcare that kept coming […]

“Exposure to microbes during early childhood is associated with protection from immune-mediated diseases such as inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and asthma. Here, we show that, in germ-free (GF) mice, invariant natural killer T (iNKT) cells accumulate in the colonic lamina propria and lung, resulting in increased morbidity in models of IBD and allergic asthma compared […]

“The results also showed that (i) consumption of an FMP containing five bacterial strains was not associated with a statistically significant change in the proportional representation of resident community members within and between individuals; (ii) the appearance and disappearance of strains comprising the FMP consortium did not exhibit familial patterns in the fecal microbiota; and […]

Indeed, Sharp said at the meeting, patients who come to Cleveland Clinic for treatment of inflammatory bowel disease express their own concerns about such approaches, which could include the use of probiotics, the consumption of live microorganisms, to treat intestinal and other maladies. “Many patients are worried about manipulating their gut microbiota,” Sharp said, adding […]

“A life-threatening germ that causes diarrhea and spreads easily from doctors’ offices to hospitals and nursing homes has climbed to historic highs nationally, federal disease trackers warned Tuesday, as they pointed to efforts in Massachusetts that have helped slow the rate of infections here.” More on this nasty bug. It’s now getting headlines. Read this […]